A Journal about Collaborative Workplaces

At the Agile Open Northwest Open Space event, Diana Larsen led some discussions about the utilization and evolution of the Agile Fluency model. Afterwards, Diana spoke to InfoQ about her involvement with and contributions to the Agile community over the last 13 years and the fluency model.

“Agile just isn’t working for my team,” Arno said. “My company decided to go Agile six months ago because we needed faster delivery, and now my team won’t even tell me when they’ll be done with the new application. They say they can’t because now they are ‘Agile’.” We could hear his air-quotes over the speaker phone connection. As we listened to our friend Arno complain about his workplace, we looked at each other. We were mentally tallying all the misunderstandings about Agile that his comments reflected. There were so many, we wondered where to start in helping him get a better handle on his situation.

Last month we talked about resilience - what it is and where it comes from. Because that newsletter prompted more comments and feedback than we have ever had to any newsletter, we decided to explore the topic a bit more. So now let’s proceed with resilience redux…

We are all familiar with the scenario. One author coins or uses a term, it gets picked up by someone else, both are quoted in a third source and so on. Pretty soon, it is on the pages of Harvard Business Review and now it is the latest bona fide management craze. Lately, there has been quite a crop of articles on resilient individuals, resilient organizations, resilience as the new skill no manager can do without, revenue resilience, etc. So I decided to do some research (OK…more like poking around) and see who is actually talking about what, based on what evidence.